[Dev Catch Up #51] - Anthropic Economic Index, Java's AI evolution, Code-based reasoning with Code I/O, AWS system correctness practices, Deprecating create react app, and much more.

Bringing devs up to speed on the latest dev news from the trends including, a bunch of exciting developments and articles.

Feb 18, 2025

Welcome to the 51st edition of DevShorts, Dev Catch Up!

For those who joined recently or are reading Dev Catch Up for the first time, I write about developer stories and open source, partly based on my work and experience interacting with people all over the globe.

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Must Read

Recently, I came across this paper from Anthropic that talked about the different economic tasks that AI performs. It was launched as part of the Anthropic Economic Index. With the help of the automated analysis tool Clio, alongside the millions of anonymous Claude conversations, the report aims to understand AI’s impact on the labour market and economy over time.
As a dev, you might have used Java once in a while. AI is evolving rapidly, and it is forcing legacy languages to keep up with the demand. For Java, it is the prominent libraries and frameworks that embed gen-AI capabilities into an application. This article looks into that solution and presents a guided tutorial on building a conversational chatbot leveraging the Oracle Generative AI service and its Java SDK.
To make an user understand a system effectively, you need an architecture diagram. But making one is not an easy task and it can lead to many mistakes. I discovered this article explaining the common mistakes that one can make while creating architectural diagrams.
Staff engineering positions are one of the topmost positions in the developer ladder and an aspiring developer like you will eye one in the future. But what does Staff Engineers do? Tobias Pfeiffer explained it beautifully through these slides.

OSS Highlight of the Week

Httptap is a tool that allows viewing the HTTP and HTTPS requests made by any linux program by running httptap -- <command>. It runs only on Linux at the present. Check this tool out from its official GitHub page.

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Good to know

AI researchers are constantly putting a lot of effort to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. While seeking more on the recent developments, this paper on Code I/O caught my attention. It is a novel approach that transforms code-based reasoning patterns into natural language formats to enhance Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities.
A lot of us use MacOS on a daily basis. ffmpeg is a tool that helps automate things in mac using folder actions. This article gives you a guided tutorial on automating computer routine using macOS folder actions.
Cursor came with a revolution for developers with AI-assisted pair programming. While most of us use it very frequently, we might be using it incorrectly. Geoffrey Huntley pointed them out beautifully with this article.
If you are into analytics, then working with metrics is a key part of the daily job. AI adaptation with metrics has led to the reduction of challenges for metrics modeling. This video from DuckCon shows a DuckDB powered SQL-based metrics layer depicting the same.
If you learning AI, you must have an understanding of knowledge distillation. It is the technique that enables knowledge transfer from large, expensive models to smaller ones without losing its validity. Learn more about it from this guided tutorial and the huggingface docs gives you its perspective of the same on image classification.
A product is a sitting duck without its documentation. As a developer, you might have written plenty of code documentations. But it is a tedious task that comes with a lot of challenges. This blog highlights the difficulties that developers face while writing API and code documentations.
If you use AWS, you will want to receive the highest standards of security, durability, integrity, and availability. System correctness helps you achieve that and this article sheds light on the proper practices leveraging formal and semi-formal methods.

Notable FYIs

Large reasoning models are the future and while reviewing many papers on the topic, this paper caught my attention. It discusses the application of reinforcement learning to large language models (LLMs), which significantly boosts performance on complex coding and reasoning tasks.
Migrating from one programming stack to another is a tough choice and as a developer, you have to select the one that makes you feel comfortable. Learn from this article on how the team at Dagger migrated their frontend from React to a combination of Go and WASM.
Designing a database is not an easy task but using compact table columns while designing one makes you cache more table records and index entries and, therefore, speed up your SQL queries. Know all about the performance improvement phenomenon from this article.
If you have worked with node and typescript, you might have noticed that ESM-based npm packages made a significant progress in the recent days. Here is a guided tutorial on publishing ESM-based npm packages with TypeScript.
Create React App is the environment that every developer relates with. It is one of the easiest ways to build a single-page web application. But it is getting deprecated. Here is the complete React article that announces the deprecation and advises existing apps to migrate to a framework.

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